The Big Midget Murders Read online

  Chapter Two

  It was probably a purely reflex action. Malone had shut the door behind him, shot back the bolt, and hissed, “Keep quiet,” before he realized that he’d even moved.

  The “Keep quiet” was entirely superfluous. Neither Jake nor Helene showed the slightest intention of making a sound. Indeed, they appeared not to have heard it at all.

  After that first, instinctive move, Malone stood still, looking not at the tiny body hanging in that singular noose, but at Jake and Helene. One of the most wonderful things about Helene, the lawyer reflected, was that you could always count on her not to scream, regardless of the provocation. She was staring at Jay Otto with eyes that had suddenly grown wide and dark, and her face had turned a ghastly white, but for all her horror, she wasn’t moving a muscle nor uttering a word.

  Jake’s face was pale too, but Malone realized it was the pallor of indignation, almost fury. For a moment he stood there, while the shocked surprise in his grey eyes turned slowly to a suppressed rage. Then he strode across the room, still speechless, and made a quick examination of the midget’s body. The look on his face when he turned round again told everything Helene and the lawyer wanted to know.

  “Well,” Malone said quietly, “I hope you can get another star act on a moment’s notice.”

  It was a good thirty seconds before Jake drew a long, profane-sounding breath, and whispered between his teeth, “The son of a bitch!”

  Helene gasped. “Jake,” she whispered. “He’s—” She looked toward what had been Jay Otto.

  “All right,” Jake said, bitterly, “so he’s a dead son of a bitch. And just like him to go and hang himself on opening night, with a four weeks’ contract left to run.”

  Malone had been looking around. “What makes you think he hung himself?”

  Jake glared at him. “I suppose you’re trying to tell me it’s an optical illusion.”

  “No,” the lawyer told him, “but maybe it was intended to be.” He scowled. “Not a very successful one, though, because something essential was left out.”

  “This is no time to play games,” Jake said. “Do you know what you’re talking about?”

  “What did he jump off?” Malone asked.

  “It’s no time to ask riddles, either,” Jake said.

  Malone sighed and pointed toward the doorway where the body was hanging. “He’d have had to have a chair, or a table, or something to jump from, or to kick out from under him. But nothing of the sort is there. What’s more, nobody but a contortionist could tie a knot exactly like that at the back of his own neck.” He strolled nearer, took a quick look, and turned away again. “No,” he repeated, “he didn’t hang himself.”

  “Oh, no!” Helene said unexpectedly, in a strange, gasping voice. She had turned a shade more pale. “It can’t be.” Her lips were stiff and trembling; soundlessly they formed the word, “Murder!”

  “Evidently,” Jake said. He looked at her for a moment, lit a cigarette, and put it between her fingers.

  “Stop looking as though you’d never heard of it before,” Malone said crossly. “There’s nothing so surprising about a mere murder.” He glanced toward the midget and added, “You might even say this was only half a murder.”

  “That’s just it,” Helene said, shuddering. “It isn’t murder that’s horrible. But this—” She caught her breath. “It isn’t like the murder of a human being. Because he never seemed to me like one. More like something—” She paused, biting her lip.

  “The word,” Malone told her, “is leprechaun.” A new look came into his eyes, far away, and almost dreamy. “So that’s it,” he said very softly. “The little men.”

  Jake stared indignantly at them both. “I suppose in another minute you’ll try to tell me a band of elves came in and murdered my star act. First it’s an optical illusion, and now it’s done with magic.”

  “It was done with something almost as unusual,” Malone said, in the same thoughtful voice. “What the devil kind of a rope is that? It looks like a bunch of silk stockings.”

  Jake examined it. “That’s exactly what it is. Long silk stockings, twisted together.” He reached toward the hook.

  “Don’t!” Helene said sharply. “Don’t touch it!” For just a moment she closed her eyes. “In another minute I’ll have the first fit of hysterics I ever had in my life.”

  “I hope to Heaven you have it quietly then,” Malone said, “because it sure would scare hell out of the cash customers out front.”

  Jake started; stared at the lawyer. “Malone, what are we going to do?”

  “In these cases,” Malone said, “it’s customary to call a cop.”

  “And have the Casino closed up tight as a drum for days?” Jake said. “It’s bad enough as it is, but if that happens, right now—” His voice trailed off.

  “Yes,” Malone said, looking at him gravely. The look of quiet desperation in Jake’s eyes had to do with the remodeling of the Casino, with the newspaper ads and the twenty-four sheet billboards, with the crowd that had turned out for opening night, and with what it would mean to have other crowds turned away for even two or three nights. “Yes,” he repeated, “I know exactly what you mean. But what can you do? When you have a murder on your hands, you can’t just walk off and leave it.”

  “No, but you can walk off and take it with you,” Jake said hoarsely. “Look, I’m a law-abiding citizen. But—”

  “The words,” Malone told him, “are law-abiding, tax-paying citizen. A citizen,” he repeated, “who happens to own a night club with a murdered midget in one of its dressing rooms.”

  “Who could have murdered him?” Helene asked. Her voice was calmer now.

  “We’ll take that up in an advanced course,” Jake snapped. “Right now, we’ve got to get him out of here.”

  For a moment there was silence. Helene crushed out her half-smoked cigarette in the saucer on the dressing table. Malone took out a cigar, started to unwrap it, then put it back in his pocket. Jake stared miserably at the opposite wall.

  “I don’t mean to dispose of the body, or anything like that,” Jake said at last. “The fact that an entertainer from the Casino has been murdered mightn’t do any harm. Maybe the reverse. But I can’t afford to take the chance. Just so he isn’t found here, on the premises. If his body should be discovered up an alley somewhere—” His voice trailed off on a questioning note.

  “But—” Malone paused, scowling. “I hate to bring up such a subject as justice at this point, but you’d be making it tough for the police if you moved the body from here. It might make the difference between their finding—or not finding—the murderer.”

  Jake said, “Frankly, from all that I’ve heard about Jay Otto, I don’t think I care whether his murderer gets caught or not. There’s more than one kind of justice in the world.”

  “Besides,” Helene said slyly, “we’d know the truth.”

  “If you’re hinting I find out who murdered him,” Malone said in an indignant voice, “you can go jump off a kite.”

  Helene sniffed. “You mean ‘go fly a lake’, don’t you?”

  He pretended he hadn’t heard her. “I don’t even want to know who murdered him,” he said in a suppressed roar. “The last time I mixed up in anything like that I was blown up by a bomb, nearly drowned in a river, trapped in a burning insane asylum, and all I got out of it was a lousy thousand bucks.” * He paused and looked thoughtfully at the late Jay Otto. “I’ll probably be sorry for this, but have it your way. How shall we carry him out of here?”

  Helene frowned. “The corridor at the top of the stairs leads to a rear entrance. But until closing time there’s always people coming and going in it.”

  * Trial by Fury.

  “Then we can’t take him out until closing time,” Malone said. “And we can’t just stay here keeping curious people out, or later somebody’ll be bound to remember we were missing for an unaccountably long time. Is there a lock on the door?”

  Jake sh
ook his head. “Only the bolt on the inside.”

  “Well then,” Malone began. He stopped suddenly, staring at Helene. “What’s the matter with you?”

  Her eyes flickered with excitement. “Look!”

  Malone looked in the direction she pointed. In the corner of the room, leaning against the wall, was a bull fiddle case. Jake looked.

  “Yes,” he said breathlessly, “yes, it would fit.”

  Malone blinked. “What in the name of all that’s impossible did he want with a bull fiddle?” he demanded.

  “It wasn’t his,” Jake explained. “One of Al Omega’s boys was fired yesterday at rehearsal. He owed the midget money, and had to leave this for security.” He crossed the room at a bound, reached for the fiddle case and suddenly paused. “Hell, that’s no good. There wouldn’t be room inside it for the midget and the fiddle too.”

  “No,” Helene agreed, “but there’s a closet here where we can store the fiddle.”

  Jake nodded slowly, and swung the big, unwieldy case down to the floor.

  “This is all very fine,” Malone said, “and a lot of good clean fun, I’ve no doubt. But if you think you can walk through a crowded corridor carrying that”—he pointed to the case—“without being conspicuous—”

  Jake sat back on his heels and looked up at Helene. “Malone’s right.” He frowned, and looked back at the case. “But this thing locks. The key is probably in the corpse’s pocket. We can lock the case and lean it back against the wall, exactly the way it was, and then when the joint is empty, come back and get it.”

  “Now you’re talking.” Helene said enthusiastically.

  Malone suppressed a sigh. He had an uncomfortable feeling that no good would come of this. But he knew better than to argue with Jake and Helene.

  “Give me a hand,” Jake said. “We’ll take him down and then go through his pockets.” He reached up toward the hook. “Hell, I can’t reach it.” He looked around for a chair. There was none.

  “For the love of Mike,” Malone growled. “Didn’t the little guy ever sit down?”

  “Not in here,” Jake said. “He had to stand up to the dressing table, and he couldn’t bear it for anybody else to be sitting down when he was standing up. Hence, no chairs. But wait a minute.” He went out into the hall, closing the door quietly after him.

  Helene waited a moment before she said, “Jake’s right about this? About moving the body out of here, I mean?” Her eyes were wide and dark and anxious.

  “Of course he is,” Malone reassured her, hoping his voice sounded more convincing than hers.

  Jake returned with a chair filched from the next-door dressing room, and set it down beside the dangling body. “We’ll get this over with in a hurry,” he said between his teeth, “and then—” He climbed up on the chair and unhitched the peculiar rope from the hook by which it had been suspended.

  “It looks like a big doll,” Helene said. She glanced quickly at the tiny body on the dressing room floor, and turned away.

  Jake looked up at her from his task of searching for the key. His jaw was set in a grim line. “I know just how you feel, but we’ve got to do this.”

  Malone spotted a quart bottle of Scotch, nearly full, on the dressing table, and reached for a glass. He couldn’t remember a time in his life when he’d needed a drink more acutely. He unscrewed the cap, started to tilt the bottle, stopped himself suddenly in the middle of the motion and stared at the top of the bottle.

  “If you’ve found a jinn in the bottle,” Jake said, “I don’t want to hear about it.” He heard a faint giggle from Helene and added hastily, “And this is no time for bad puns.”

  Malone ignored him. He was holding the bottle directly under the electric light and staring at it intently.

  “Maybe it doesn’t mean a thing,” he said at last, “but there’s a little line of white powder on the rim.” He screwed the cap back on the bottle, set it on the dresser again, and stood looking at it suspiciously.

  Helene gasped. “He may have been poisoned first, and then—” She paused.

  After a moment Jake said, “I thought it was funny he didn’t put up a struggle. Even a midget might make a fuss if somebody was trying to hang him. Thank God, here’s that key.”

  He unlocked the case, lifted out a big, shining bull fiddle, stowed it in the closet, and closed the door.

  “But why?” Helene demanded. “Why not just poison him and let it go at that? Why go to all the bother of hanging him afterwards?”

  “Never mind why,” Malone growled. “This is no time to ask foolish questions. Let’s get this over and get out of here.”

  Jake had unfastened the noose, and tossed the shimmering strand aside on the floor. Helene picked it up half curiously, and began examining and unwinding it.

  “There must be a dozen stockings here,” she reported, “just twisted and knotted together. Why on earth use stockings, when it’s so easy to find a rope?”

  Jake had closed the fiddle case and was preparing to lock it. Now he paused and opened it again.

  “Give me those stockings and I’ll put them in here too. We can’t just leave them lying around.”

  “Wait a minute,” Helene said. Her eyes were blazing. Then suddenly she tossed the stockings to Jake, and looked up.

  “There’s exactly eleven stockings here,” she reported.

  “Well?” Jake said. “What of it?” He locked the fiddle case and stood it up in the corner, exactly as it had been. “We all know you can count.”

  “Eleven stockings,” she said slowly. “The funny thing about it is that none of them were exactly the same size!”

  Chapter Three

  “The important thing,” Jake said, lighting Helene’s cigarette for her, “is to stay out here where everybody can see us, and act as though everything was perfectly normal.”

  Malone nodded, gazing out over the still crowded dance floor of the Casino. From some long buried place in his memory came the picture of an Irish grandmother telling him how to cope with the strange and horrible things that might appear in the dark of night. “Just look at them and pretend they aren’t there at all, and keep very still, and afore long they’ll go away of their own accord.”

  Perhaps if he kept very still, and pretended the tiny corpse of Jay Otto wasn’t concealed in the bass fiddle case, the whole horror would go away of its own accord, as though it had never been there at all.

  It wasn’t just that a man had been murdered. He’d encountered murders before. Nor that Jake and Helene might be in a devilishly tight spot. They’d get out of it, as they always had in the past. Indeed, it wasn’t even the fact that the murdered man was a midget. No, it went deeper than any of those things. It was just that the little lawyer felt that all of them were skirting the edge of something strange and dark and terrible, something he couldn’t describe or explain, but that he knew was there.

  “Stop looking as if you saw ghosts on our lovely new dance floor, Malone,” Helene said sharply.

  Malone sighed, began slowly unwrapping a cigar, and tried unsuccessfully to pretend that he was having a wonderful time.

  Al Omega’s band was back at work again, and the dance floor was jammed. Max Hook and his bodyguards had gone, the lawyer noticed with relief, and a party of noisy young people occupied what had been his table. The Goldsmiths were still there, the big, homely man looking worried and unhappy, his blonde wife’s lips set in a thin, cross line. Betty Royal was still at her table, entirely oblivious of the wistful and curious glances cast in her direction by the pretty young stenographers in their five-ninety-five formals, equally oblivious of the attention she was drawing from her tableful of handsome young men. She was gazing at Al Omega like a kitten gazing at a can of sardines.

  Malone glanced up at the orchestra leader. “How does he do it?” he growled under his breath.

  Most of the early evening crowd had gone, and their places had been taken by a later, noisier crowd, who would not remain long. It would only be a lit
tle while before the Casino would begin to empty. The lawyer drew a long, almost sighing breath, and leaned across the table to Helene.

  “I don’t get it about those stockings,” he said in a low voice. “You said there were eleven of them, and all different sizes.”

  She nodded her sleek blonde head. “I measured them. I happened to pick up two and they didn’t look alike, so I measured them all.”

  Malone scowled at her. “I’m not calling you a liar,” he began slowly, “but I’ve paid for a lot of silk stockings in my lifetime. And there aren’t eleven different sizes. There’s eight and a half, nine, nine and a half, and so on up. I think the largest size made is twelve, but I never knew a girl with bigger feet than that. You couldn’t have had a hallucination, could you?”

  “I could,” she whispered indignantly, “but I didn’t. Those were specially made stockings, and besides being different foot sizes, they were different lengths. There weren’t any two of them alike.” She crushed out her cigarette. “They were the kind of stockings the chorus here wears in that South American number, and all those girls are different heights. Jake!”

  “I heard you,” Jake said, “and shut up!” He glanced around quickly to see that no one was in hearing distance before he spoke again. “All I need now is to be told that the midget was murdered by the best night club chorus in town.” He paused, frowned, and added, “Not that they wouldn’t have liked to.”

  Malone relit his cigar. “Now that we’re on the subject, who might have wanted to murder your midget?”

  “I don’t know,” Jake said thoughtfully. “Nobody really liked him, and a lot of people downright hated him, but not murderously, as far as I know. I can’t imagine anybody hating him that much.”

  Helene nodded. “It would take twice as much motive to make someone murder a midget as an ordinary person. You’d think it would be just the other way, but it isn’t.”